better late than never
Gah, I missed my Halloween deadline. Is it too late to post photos of pumpkins? Of course not. These aren't carved into ghoulish and gruesome faces but presented straight off the vine as beautiful as nature intended. Nothing says Halloween like a pumpkin unless you count Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and flesh eating zombies.
I don't actually clebrate Halloween. Perhaps 'observe' is a better word than celebrate. It seems to have bumped Guy Fawkes Night right off the calender and I'd much rather watch fireworks lighting the sky than the neighbourhood youth causing havoc door to door. Also I'm not good with horror. Blowing up Parliament? Fine. Who hasn't thought of doing that? But evisceration, murder, black magic, hauntings? No thanks. The last horror film I sat through was probably Friday 13th, the original one, it scarred me for life and I've avoided any scary film since. I read ghost stories occassionally, Victorian ones, I can handle 19th century horror (Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, M.R. James), there is an innocence to it that appeals to me but anything more modern will deprive me of sleep for nights on end. We have far more depraved imaginations than our forebears, but, having said that, they did produce Jack the Ripper.
I've tried writing ghost stories and have failed miserably. It's because I don't know the tropes and conventions of the genre so I don't know how to make a ghost/horror story work. You have to read a lot of them to be good at writing them. I have a tremendously vivid imagination when it comes to wondering what just went bump in the night, but no talent at all for writing about it. I do, however, have a great recipe for pumpkin and ginger soup and that alone is why I will always welcome Halloween.
Photos are the author's own
I don't actually clebrate Halloween. Perhaps 'observe' is a better word than celebrate. It seems to have bumped Guy Fawkes Night right off the calender and I'd much rather watch fireworks lighting the sky than the neighbourhood youth causing havoc door to door. Also I'm not good with horror. Blowing up Parliament? Fine. Who hasn't thought of doing that? But evisceration, murder, black magic, hauntings? No thanks. The last horror film I sat through was probably Friday 13th, the original one, it scarred me for life and I've avoided any scary film since. I read ghost stories occassionally, Victorian ones, I can handle 19th century horror (Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, M.R. James), there is an innocence to it that appeals to me but anything more modern will deprive me of sleep for nights on end. We have far more depraved imaginations than our forebears, but, having said that, they did produce Jack the Ripper.
I've tried writing ghost stories and have failed miserably. It's because I don't know the tropes and conventions of the genre so I don't know how to make a ghost/horror story work. You have to read a lot of them to be good at writing them. I have a tremendously vivid imagination when it comes to wondering what just went bump in the night, but no talent at all for writing about it. I do, however, have a great recipe for pumpkin and ginger soup and that alone is why I will always welcome Halloween.
Photos are the author's own
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